最近几天，重庆市内的一栋“孤岛”式的房子，因为户主杨武、吴苹夫妇拒绝搬迁，而成为海内外媒体关注的焦点。而这户人家，也赢得了“中国有史以来最牛的钉子户”的美名。
可我认为，杨武、吴苹夫妇只不过是尽一切力量来设法保住自己的资产，维护自己的合法权益。以困兽犹斗、背水一战来形容他们倒是十分贴切，说他们牛似乎还谈不上。
真正牛的不是他们，而是遍布中国各地，通过各种手段来迫迁居民，又不给予合理赔偿的房地产开发商。之所以说他们牛，是因为他们干了中国近现代史上最有钱的富豪和最有权的最高领导人都干不了的事。
到过杭州的人，都知道杭州城东南角元宝街有座占地10.5亩的豪宅。这座豪宅原来的主人，就是清朝末年大名鼎鼎的“红顶商人”——中国首富胡雪岩。胡雪岩的“红顶商人”可不是花钱买来的，也不是和什么地方官员勾结弄到手的，而是因为协助左宗棠兴办洋务，有功于国家，受到清廷嘉奖，封布政使衔，赐红顶戴，紫禁城骑马，赏穿黄马褂。用当代的语言来说，就是享受副省级政治待遇，能够自由开车进出中南海的民营企业家。
胡雪岩当年在建造这栋豪宅时，遇到了麻烦事——大宅西北角的一家剃头铺，成了钉子户，原因当然不是胡首富不舍得花银子。事实上，胡首富愿意给剃头铺老板比市价多出好几倍的赔偿，但是人家就是不肯搬走。
以胡雪岩当年的财力和权势，如果决心要赶走剃头匠，太容易了，只要派几个家丁把铺子烧了就了事。可是，胡老板一直到死都没有去动剃头匠。
另一个例子是浙江奉化的蒋氏故居。这个蒋家可不是普通的蒋家，其主人是曾经领导国民革命军东征、北伐，曾经领导中华民族全民抗战的中华民国总统、中国国民党总裁、国民政府军事委员会委员长蒋介石！
蒋介石在南京国民政府成立，当上总统后，想扩建奉化老家的旧房子，于是要让周围的邻居拆迁，好给蒋家腾出地盘。邻居们得知蒋家扩建房子的事后，都纷纷让出自己的宅基地，而蒋家也是给足了赔偿的。
可是，偏偏有个不识相的邻居周顺房，硬是不肯搬。于是，就有些地方官，背着蒋介石给周顺房施压。开始时，周顺房不为所动，后来实在顶不住压力，只好退让，却心不甘情不愿的说了句：“瑞元（瑞元是蒋介石的小名）当皇帝了，他让我搬，我不得不搬……”远在南京的蒋介石得知此事后，把那些地方官臭骂了一顿，特别交代不要强制周家拆迁。
直到今日，奉化蒋氏故居面临剡溪的大院右侧，还有一个“周顺房千层饼店”，嵌在蒋家大院的一角。这就是周顺房当年留下来的“钉子户”了。
论钱，估计当代中国没有一个房地产开发商或民营企业家，能阔过“红顶商人”胡雪岩；论权，他们更不可能强过集党政军权力于一身的强人蒋介石，可是他们却能毫不理会户主同不同意，说拆就拆。这一点，是胡首富和蒋总统望尘莫及的，所以说他们是有史以来最牛的开发商。
http://zaobao.com/zg/zg070325_509.html
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Lopsided Hong Kong Election Still Draws Interest
March 24, 2007
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG, Sunday, March 25 — As 796 electors prepared to cast their votes on Sunday in Hong Kong’s first contested election for chief executive, the Beijing-backed incumbent appeared almost certain to win re-election by a wide margin.
But the race has drawn more attention than expected here and across the border in mainland China.
For the first time, a democracy advocate, Alan Leong, has been able to get on the ballot by obtaining nominations from more than 100 of the 796 electors, who are mainly business people and politicians with links to mainland China. Hong Kong has also held its first two debates pitting a leader of the territory against an opponent actively promoting democracy.
The campaign has grown sufficiently contentious that mainland authorities have temporarily blocked signals from CNN even when Beijing’s favored candidate, Donald Tsang, has articulated his position on eventual democracy here.
People in the neighboring Guangdong province can receive television signals from Hong Kong, and have been expressing envy to Hong Kong television crews over this territory’s limited liberties.
“They say, why don’t we have the same thing for the election of our governors?” Mr. Tsang said in an interview Friday, adding that he did not have a position on whether this was good or bad.
Mr. Tsang said in the interview, with five foreign correspondents, that he wanted to introduce in the next five years a democracy plan that would satisfy the 60 percent of Hong Kong’s people who consistently tell pollsters that they want a system of one person, one vote.
But he declined to provide any details. He tried and failed in 2005 to fashion a consensus that would satisfy democracy advocates without upsetting Beijing leaders, who worry about losing control here, and without antagonizing local business leaders, some of whom warn that greater democracy could lead to demands for the introduction of a minimum wage and greater welfare spending.
Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a group of academics studying the evolution of democratic liberties in Hong Kong, said that Mr. Tsang’s comments over the past five months of the campaign showed a discernible shift toward greater enthusiasm for addressing the question of greater democracy here.
Mr. Tsang is considered virtually certain to win because he has Beijing’s backing and was nominated by 641 of the 796 electors. Only 132 electors chose Mr. Leong.
With unemployment falling and the economy booming, polls by Hong Kong University and other groups suggest that if the general public could vote, they would overwhelmingly choose Mr. Tsang. He has four decades of experience in public service while Mr. Leong is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association who emerged as the pro-democracy candidate after better-known politicians decided that it was hopeless to run against Mr. Tsang.
Roughly 200,000 professionals among Hong Kong’s 7 million people were eligible to vote for electors late last year, choosing slightly over half of the electors. The rest of the electors hold their position because of the offices they hold, such as being a member of the legislature here or of the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
Sunday’s elections also represent the first time that a secret ballot has been used to choose the next leader of Hong Kong. This has prompted speculation that some electors, secretly unhappy with Mr. Tsang but obliged to support him publicly to satisfy Beijing, might cast blank ballots while in the privacy of voting booths.
Stanley Ho, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Tsang who controls many of the casinos in nearby Macao, caused controversy two weeks ago by saying there was a way to find out who cast which vote. Mr. Ho later said that he had only meant to cite a local expression that every secret eventually becomes known.
Election officials have been issuing almost daily assurances ever since that ballots will be truly secret, with no photography allowed in the voting area and no serial numbers or other identifying marks on the ballots.
“It will leave some lurking doubt, so unless people have strong views, they will vote for Donald Tsang,” said Margaret Ng, a pro-democracy lawmaker who is an elector and supports Mr. Leong.
Longtime democracy advocates in Hong Kong remain divided over the wisdom of participating in elections with rules that make it certain they will lose. The two most prominent figures in the pro-democracy movement here — Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, and Anson Chan, a former second-ranking official in the Hong Kong government — each declined to run this spring.
Under the British, who ruled Hong Kong until its return to Chinese rule in 1997, colonial governors were appointed by London with practically no regard for sentiment here. The initial rules drafted by Beijing officials for choosing chief executives were highly restrictive — there were only 400 electors in the first election in late 1996, and each elector’s name and vote were posted on a board, a move that made it impossible to provide secret support for democracy advocates.
With those rules, the democracy movement boycotted chief executive elections in 1996 and 2002, both of which were won by Tung Chee-hwa, a shipping magnate. When Mr. Tung stepped down in 2005 and elections were held for the two years remaining in his second five-year term, the chairman of the Democratic Party, the largest opposition party, tried to run but failed to secure the 100 nominations from electors necessary to obtain a place on the ballot.
The Democratic Party and the similar Civic Party have enthusiastically backed Mr. Leong’s candidacy this year, but other pro-democracy groups continue to boycott the political process, most notably the influential Catholic diocese of Hong Kong, which has the right to name seven electors.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the leader of the church, said in an interview that while the Vatican would allow church officials to serve as electors, he and other clergy had chosen not to do so because the elections were not a democratic process.
Instead, the diocese has allowed parishioners to apply to fill the seven spots as electors, and has given no instruction to these parishioners on how to vote, Cardinal Zen said.
In a separate development, Cardinal Zen said that the Vatican had just turned down his offer of his resignation as bishop of Hong Kong. It is standard practice in the Catholic Church for bishops to offer their resignation when they turn 75, as Cardinal Zen did in January; he would have remained a cardinal even if he stepped down as bishop, and had said that he would like to be relieved of his duties here so that he could focus more on relations with China.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/world/asia/25hong.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG, Sunday, March 25 — As 796 electors prepared to cast their votes on Sunday in Hong Kong’s first contested election for chief executive, the Beijing-backed incumbent appeared almost certain to win re-election by a wide margin.
But the race has drawn more attention than expected here and across the border in mainland China.
For the first time, a democracy advocate, Alan Leong, has been able to get on the ballot by obtaining nominations from more than 100 of the 796 electors, who are mainly business people and politicians with links to mainland China. Hong Kong has also held its first two debates pitting a leader of the territory against an opponent actively promoting democracy.
The campaign has grown sufficiently contentious that mainland authorities have temporarily blocked signals from CNN even when Beijing’s favored candidate, Donald Tsang, has articulated his position on eventual democracy here.
People in the neighboring Guangdong province can receive television signals from Hong Kong, and have been expressing envy to Hong Kong television crews over this territory’s limited liberties.
“They say, why don’t we have the same thing for the election of our governors?” Mr. Tsang said in an interview Friday, adding that he did not have a position on whether this was good or bad.
Mr. Tsang said in the interview, with five foreign correspondents, that he wanted to introduce in the next five years a democracy plan that would satisfy the 60 percent of Hong Kong’s people who consistently tell pollsters that they want a system of one person, one vote.
But he declined to provide any details. He tried and failed in 2005 to fashion a consensus that would satisfy democracy advocates without upsetting Beijing leaders, who worry about losing control here, and without antagonizing local business leaders, some of whom warn that greater democracy could lead to demands for the introduction of a minimum wage and greater welfare spending.
Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a group of academics studying the evolution of democratic liberties in Hong Kong, said that Mr. Tsang’s comments over the past five months of the campaign showed a discernible shift toward greater enthusiasm for addressing the question of greater democracy here.
Mr. Tsang is considered virtually certain to win because he has Beijing’s backing and was nominated by 641 of the 796 electors. Only 132 electors chose Mr. Leong.
With unemployment falling and the economy booming, polls by Hong Kong University and other groups suggest that if the general public could vote, they would overwhelmingly choose Mr. Tsang. He has four decades of experience in public service while Mr. Leong is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association who emerged as the pro-democracy candidate after better-known politicians decided that it was hopeless to run against Mr. Tsang.
Roughly 200,000 professionals among Hong Kong’s 7 million people were eligible to vote for electors late last year, choosing slightly over half of the electors. The rest of the electors hold their position because of the offices they hold, such as being a member of the legislature here or of the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
Sunday’s elections also represent the first time that a secret ballot has been used to choose the next leader of Hong Kong. This has prompted speculation that some electors, secretly unhappy with Mr. Tsang but obliged to support him publicly to satisfy Beijing, might cast blank ballots while in the privacy of voting booths.
Stanley Ho, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Tsang who controls many of the casinos in nearby Macao, caused controversy two weeks ago by saying there was a way to find out who cast which vote. Mr. Ho later said that he had only meant to cite a local expression that every secret eventually becomes known.
Election officials have been issuing almost daily assurances ever since that ballots will be truly secret, with no photography allowed in the voting area and no serial numbers or other identifying marks on the ballots.
“It will leave some lurking doubt, so unless people have strong views, they will vote for Donald Tsang,” said Margaret Ng, a pro-democracy lawmaker who is an elector and supports Mr. Leong.
Longtime democracy advocates in Hong Kong remain divided over the wisdom of participating in elections with rules that make it certain they will lose. The two most prominent figures in the pro-democracy movement here — Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, and Anson Chan, a former second-ranking official in the Hong Kong government — each declined to run this spring.
Under the British, who ruled Hong Kong until its return to Chinese rule in 1997, colonial governors were appointed by London with practically no regard for sentiment here. The initial rules drafted by Beijing officials for choosing chief executives were highly restrictive — there were only 400 electors in the first election in late 1996, and each elector’s name and vote were posted on a board, a move that made it impossible to provide secret support for democracy advocates.
With those rules, the democracy movement boycotted chief executive elections in 1996 and 2002, both of which were won by Tung Chee-hwa, a shipping magnate. When Mr. Tung stepped down in 2005 and elections were held for the two years remaining in his second five-year term, the chairman of the Democratic Party, the largest opposition party, tried to run but failed to secure the 100 nominations from electors necessary to obtain a place on the ballot.
The Democratic Party and the similar Civic Party have enthusiastically backed Mr. Leong’s candidacy this year, but other pro-democracy groups continue to boycott the political process, most notably the influential Catholic diocese of Hong Kong, which has the right to name seven electors.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the leader of the church, said in an interview that while the Vatican would allow church officials to serve as electors, he and other clergy had chosen not to do so because the elections were not a democratic process.
Instead, the diocese has allowed parishioners to apply to fill the seven spots as electors, and has given no instruction to these parishioners on how to vote, Cardinal Zen said.
In a separate development, Cardinal Zen said that the Vatican had just turned down his offer of his resignation as bishop of Hong Kong. It is standard practice in the Catholic Church for bishops to offer their resignation when they turn 75, as Cardinal Zen did in January; he would have remained a cardinal even if he stepped down as bishop, and had said that he would like to be relieved of his duties here so that he could focus more on relations with China.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/world/asia/25hong.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
For a Europe Remade, a Celebration in Uncertainty
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
SEVILLE
It is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, "Poland is the new Spain, absolutely." He continued: "Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland."
If history is prologue, Michnik is likely to be right. The EU, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and to free commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Michnik called "the first revolution that has been absolutely positive."
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy the EU's conjuring away of agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
This achievement will be symbolized when leaders from the 27 EU member states gather this weekend in Berlin - the city that stood at the crux of violent 20th-century European division. They will sign a "Berlin Declaration" celebrating the peace, freedom, wealth and democracy that the Treaty of Rome has now helped spread among almost half a billion Europeans.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger EU, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Which bits of it, if any, can be revived remains murky.
Integration has been a European triumph. But it has often failed with large-scale Muslim immigration, creating complex security issues that the Union is struggling to address.
"The EU is on autopilot, in stalemate, in deep crisis," said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, who seven years ago called for a European federation run by a true European government. "There is a lack of political will to create the efficient institutions enlargement demanded. You can't double the size of a company without changing the way it works."
The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an "ever closer union among the European peoples"; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe. The bold politics nestled inside basic economics - making a common market - and was thus rendered unthreatening. A common currency, the euro, emerged in 2002.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power and integration have lagged. Europeans tend to do peacekeeping these days rather than wars.
Recent disputes - from Iraq to current American plans to install missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic - have shown how hard it is for the EU to speak with one voice or, as Fischer put it, "define what strategic interests it has in common." Nonetheless, "autopilot" in the EU still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland between now and 2013 to upgrade the country's infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the EU in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco's dictatorship.
The result has been Spain's extraordinary transition from a country whose per-capita output stood at 71 percent of the European average in 1985, to 90 percent in 2004, and now stands at 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members.
In the space of a generation, Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Last year it created 40 percent of the new jobs among countries using the euro. Its EU-stimulated confidence is palpable.
Growth is a terrific trauma dampener. Dictatorship in Spain, 21 years after EU membership, seems utterly remote. Poland under the Kaczynski brothers is far from overcoming the painful legacy of communist tyranny, but by 2025 - its 21-year membership anniversary - it seems safe to say that healing will be advanced. The potential fallout of divisive rule is curtailed by EU membership.
"The EU slashes political risk," said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. "It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt."
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been a powerful force in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatizations and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Open skies for freer airline competition, and the slashed fares that go with it, are just one visible expression of this process. "Europe would be immensely less competitive and less prosperous without the single market framework," Huhne said.
Which is not to say, of course, that European capitalism is U.S. capitalism. It is less fluid; it creates fewer jobs. It is also less harsh.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model - one of universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits - has become a tenet of European identity in contrast to an America where 45 million citizens (about the population of Spain) lack health insurance.
How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists 50 years after the Treaty of Rome is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of EU inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity. The Erasmus program, established by the former EU Commission president, Jacques Delors, has helped about 1.5 million young Europeans spend a year studying in European universities outside their own countries.
The hit movie "L'Auberge Espagnole," or "The Spanish Inn," captured the Erasmus experience: jumbled cultures, linguistic and amorous discovery, and the births of new identities from this mingling. Countless Eurocouples have not been the least of the EU's achievements.
How this generation will deal with the EU's central conundrum - what is often called the issue of its "finality" or end point - remains an open question. It is open geographically: The Union could end at the Iranian and Iraqi borders if Turkey joins. It is also open politically: How much of a federation, with its own executive and legislature, its own president and foreign minister, should Europe be?
The EU has been upended by communism's unexpected demise. The European Economic Community, as established in 1957, did not try to liberate the Continent; it tried to ensure that half of it cohered in freedom.
"Europe was initially built on accepting with more or less equanimity to forget about half of it, including historic centers of European civilization like Prague or Budapest," said Jonathan Eyal, a British strategic analyst. "And the irony is that it is precisely the return of these centers that has thrown the EU into existential crisis today."
That crisis is partly procedural. It is not clear how you get things done in a Europe of 27. It is partly of identity. The rapidly cohering Europe with a Franco- German core is gone, and nobody quite knows what to put in its place. And it is partly political. The conception of Europe in post-Communist countries is simply different.
These differences, which lurked behind the rejection of the EU constitution, have been most apparent of late in the flaring tensions between Germany and Poland, two countries whose reconciliation has been one of the EU's conspicuous miracles.
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski's conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the EU has been clear.
"Poland under Kaczynski is anti-federalist, quite nationalistic, and very conservative," said Karl Kaiser, a German political analyst. "It looks out and tends to see the old Germany and the old expansionist Russia. It has not taken part mentally in the long process of integration."
So Warsaw sees Moscow-Berlin plots of sinister memory when Russia and Germany agree to build a gas pipeline directly between each other, under the Baltic Sea rather than over Poland.
It pushes hard, but unsuccessfully, for references to Europe's Christian roots in the Berlin declaration. It contemplates, as does the Czech Republic, installing part of a new U.S. missile defense system against Iran, and does so despite German unease, Russian fury and the absence of any EU or NATO consensus.
Of course, what Poles and Czechs see beyond Germany or Russia is the America that defeated the Soviet Union and freed them: Poles, as Michnik noted, "tend to be more pro-American than Americans."
Whatever tempering of this sentiment Iraq has brought, Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe remain more pro-American than the Europe of the Treaty of Rome and the Union's first decades. With Britain they now form a club within the club that sees Europe more as market than political force, more as loose alignment than strategic union.
"For Britain, Europe is a convenience rather than a concept," said Karsten Voigt, a German Foreign Ministry official.
This is an intractable division. It seems likely to affect Europe's search for strategic cohesion for many years. The Bush administration has accentuated the split with its ad hoc, treat- NATO-as-a-tool-box approach to its European alliances. That stance was evident at the time of the Iraq invasion and is evident again today over the missile defense system. Coalitions of the willing tend to make the unwilling bristle.
At a deeper level, Homo europeus, formed over 50 years, now lies at some distance from Homo americanus. Because it is process that has delivered answers to long unanswerable European problems like the German question, post-heroic Europeans tend to favor procedure, talk, international institutions and incremental measures to resolve issues where heroic Americans tend to favor resolve backed by force.
Peace is much more of an absolute value today in Europe than in the United States. Opposition to the death penalty and commitment to reversing global warming are also near universal values, where they remain contentious in America. So what? The ties that bind the Atlantic family remain strong.
But, unglued by the Cold War's end, they are not as strong as they were. As Kaiser noted, "the European Union would not exist without American support." It was American forces, not European, that stared down the Soviet Union and delivered the Europe whole and free being celebrated in Berlin.
Yet the celebration is European rather than Euro-American. The EU sees the United States today more through the prism of Baghdad than Berlin. Generations pass; memories fade; perceptions change. That is inevitable. The great achievement of the EU has been to absorb those changes and zigzags within the broader push for unity.
That push, that journey, is incomplete. But Europeans have learned, as Eyal said, that "traveling can be just as good as arriving." Perpetual difficulty has been the EU's perpetual stimulus. A United States of Europe remains a distant, probably unreachable dream. At the same time, continent-wide war has become an unthinkable nightmare.
"The EU is an unfinished project, but so what?" said Voigt. "Why be nervous? We have time."
Time enough even, the 50-year history of the EU suggests, for Turkey to become the new Poland.
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/03/24/world/IHT-24europe.html?pagewanted=1&ref=world
International Herald Tribune
SEVILLE
It is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, "Poland is the new Spain, absolutely." He continued: "Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland."
If history is prologue, Michnik is likely to be right. The EU, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and to free commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Michnik called "the first revolution that has been absolutely positive."
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy the EU's conjuring away of agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
This achievement will be symbolized when leaders from the 27 EU member states gather this weekend in Berlin - the city that stood at the crux of violent 20th-century European division. They will sign a "Berlin Declaration" celebrating the peace, freedom, wealth and democracy that the Treaty of Rome has now helped spread among almost half a billion Europeans.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger EU, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Which bits of it, if any, can be revived remains murky.
Integration has been a European triumph. But it has often failed with large-scale Muslim immigration, creating complex security issues that the Union is struggling to address.
"The EU is on autopilot, in stalemate, in deep crisis," said Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, who seven years ago called for a European federation run by a true European government. "There is a lack of political will to create the efficient institutions enlargement demanded. You can't double the size of a company without changing the way it works."
The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an "ever closer union among the European peoples"; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe. The bold politics nestled inside basic economics - making a common market - and was thus rendered unthreatening. A common currency, the euro, emerged in 2002.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power and integration have lagged. Europeans tend to do peacekeeping these days rather than wars.
Recent disputes - from Iraq to current American plans to install missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic - have shown how hard it is for the EU to speak with one voice or, as Fischer put it, "define what strategic interests it has in common." Nonetheless, "autopilot" in the EU still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland between now and 2013 to upgrade the country's infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the EU in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco's dictatorship.
The result has been Spain's extraordinary transition from a country whose per-capita output stood at 71 percent of the European average in 1985, to 90 percent in 2004, and now stands at 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members.
In the space of a generation, Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Last year it created 40 percent of the new jobs among countries using the euro. Its EU-stimulated confidence is palpable.
Growth is a terrific trauma dampener. Dictatorship in Spain, 21 years after EU membership, seems utterly remote. Poland under the Kaczynski brothers is far from overcoming the painful legacy of communist tyranny, but by 2025 - its 21-year membership anniversary - it seems safe to say that healing will be advanced. The potential fallout of divisive rule is curtailed by EU membership.
"The EU slashes political risk," said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. "It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt."
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been a powerful force in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatizations and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Open skies for freer airline competition, and the slashed fares that go with it, are just one visible expression of this process. "Europe would be immensely less competitive and less prosperous without the single market framework," Huhne said.
Which is not to say, of course, that European capitalism is U.S. capitalism. It is less fluid; it creates fewer jobs. It is also less harsh.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model - one of universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits - has become a tenet of European identity in contrast to an America where 45 million citizens (about the population of Spain) lack health insurance.
How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists 50 years after the Treaty of Rome is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of EU inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity. The Erasmus program, established by the former EU Commission president, Jacques Delors, has helped about 1.5 million young Europeans spend a year studying in European universities outside their own countries.
The hit movie "L'Auberge Espagnole," or "The Spanish Inn," captured the Erasmus experience: jumbled cultures, linguistic and amorous discovery, and the births of new identities from this mingling. Countless Eurocouples have not been the least of the EU's achievements.
How this generation will deal with the EU's central conundrum - what is often called the issue of its "finality" or end point - remains an open question. It is open geographically: The Union could end at the Iranian and Iraqi borders if Turkey joins. It is also open politically: How much of a federation, with its own executive and legislature, its own president and foreign minister, should Europe be?
The EU has been upended by communism's unexpected demise. The European Economic Community, as established in 1957, did not try to liberate the Continent; it tried to ensure that half of it cohered in freedom.
"Europe was initially built on accepting with more or less equanimity to forget about half of it, including historic centers of European civilization like Prague or Budapest," said Jonathan Eyal, a British strategic analyst. "And the irony is that it is precisely the return of these centers that has thrown the EU into existential crisis today."
That crisis is partly procedural. It is not clear how you get things done in a Europe of 27. It is partly of identity. The rapidly cohering Europe with a Franco- German core is gone, and nobody quite knows what to put in its place. And it is partly political. The conception of Europe in post-Communist countries is simply different.
These differences, which lurked behind the rejection of the EU constitution, have been most apparent of late in the flaring tensions between Germany and Poland, two countries whose reconciliation has been one of the EU's conspicuous miracles.
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski's conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the EU has been clear.
"Poland under Kaczynski is anti-federalist, quite nationalistic, and very conservative," said Karl Kaiser, a German political analyst. "It looks out and tends to see the old Germany and the old expansionist Russia. It has not taken part mentally in the long process of integration."
So Warsaw sees Moscow-Berlin plots of sinister memory when Russia and Germany agree to build a gas pipeline directly between each other, under the Baltic Sea rather than over Poland.
It pushes hard, but unsuccessfully, for references to Europe's Christian roots in the Berlin declaration. It contemplates, as does the Czech Republic, installing part of a new U.S. missile defense system against Iran, and does so despite German unease, Russian fury and the absence of any EU or NATO consensus.
Of course, what Poles and Czechs see beyond Germany or Russia is the America that defeated the Soviet Union and freed them: Poles, as Michnik noted, "tend to be more pro-American than Americans."
Whatever tempering of this sentiment Iraq has brought, Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe remain more pro-American than the Europe of the Treaty of Rome and the Union's first decades. With Britain they now form a club within the club that sees Europe more as market than political force, more as loose alignment than strategic union.
"For Britain, Europe is a convenience rather than a concept," said Karsten Voigt, a German Foreign Ministry official.
This is an intractable division. It seems likely to affect Europe's search for strategic cohesion for many years. The Bush administration has accentuated the split with its ad hoc, treat- NATO-as-a-tool-box approach to its European alliances. That stance was evident at the time of the Iraq invasion and is evident again today over the missile defense system. Coalitions of the willing tend to make the unwilling bristle.
At a deeper level, Homo europeus, formed over 50 years, now lies at some distance from Homo americanus. Because it is process that has delivered answers to long unanswerable European problems like the German question, post-heroic Europeans tend to favor procedure, talk, international institutions and incremental measures to resolve issues where heroic Americans tend to favor resolve backed by force.
Peace is much more of an absolute value today in Europe than in the United States. Opposition to the death penalty and commitment to reversing global warming are also near universal values, where they remain contentious in America. So what? The ties that bind the Atlantic family remain strong.
But, unglued by the Cold War's end, they are not as strong as they were. As Kaiser noted, "the European Union would not exist without American support." It was American forces, not European, that stared down the Soviet Union and delivered the Europe whole and free being celebrated in Berlin.
Yet the celebration is European rather than Euro-American. The EU sees the United States today more through the prism of Baghdad than Berlin. Generations pass; memories fade; perceptions change. That is inevitable. The great achievement of the EU has been to absorb those changes and zigzags within the broader push for unity.
That push, that journey, is incomplete. But Europeans have learned, as Eyal said, that "traveling can be just as good as arriving." Perpetual difficulty has been the EU's perpetual stimulus. A United States of Europe remains a distant, probably unreachable dream. At the same time, continent-wide war has become an unthinkable nightmare.
"The EU is an unfinished project, but so what?" said Voigt. "Why be nervous? We have time."
Time enough even, the 50-year history of the EU suggests, for Turkey to become the new Poland.
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/03/24/world/IHT-24europe.html?pagewanted=1&ref=world
No Sex, Please, We’re French [NY Times]
Op-Ed Contributor
By STEPHEN CLARKE
Published: March 23, 2007
Paris
THE French claim to be a nation of rebels. They guillotined Louis XVI in 1793, they had uprisings in 1848 and 1871, and they boast that they maintain this noble tradition of protest in their habit of rioting every time there are rumblings of political discontent.
In fact, though, their heyday of revolution is over. Twenty-first century France rebels against change, not for it. These days, what typically happens is that a government decides to do something radical like, say, enable companies to fire service-sector workers who assault their customers. The unions see this as the first step on the slippery slope to slavery and call a national strike. After a week of posturing, the government backs down and waiters and sales clerks go back to insulting customers just as they have done since time immemorial.
The 2007 presidential election campaign is demonstrating just how deep this crypto-conservatism runs. After a relatively exciting, gossip-fired start to the battle for power, the French have decided, as the first round of the election approaches in April, that they want things to be boring again.
Historically, French presidents have been old, bald guys — Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac. In terms of sexiness, imagine an endless line of Dick Cheneys. This time, though, both front-runners have all their hair and, in one case, lipstick. Quite a novelty.
In the right-hand corner, you have a free-marketeer and friend to pop stars, Nicolas Sarkozy, 52. On the left, there is Ségolène Royal, age 53 but looking younger every day. She is unmarried but has four children with her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist Party chairman.
Given Ms. Royal and Mr. Sarkozy’s relative youth, it’s not surprising that this is the first time that sex has played such a large part in an electoral campaign. Everyone knew that Messrs. Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac had mistresses, but no one paid much attention because everything was done discreetly. Besides, the French don’t believe that monogamy makes a politician any more efficient.
This time around, sex has come storming out of the closet. There was the incident a couple of years ago when Mr. Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, ran off to New York with her lover. In a dramatic turnaround, Mr. Sarkozy wooed his wife back, maybe with promises that she’d soon be choosing the curtains in the presidential palace. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa smile on Ms. Royal’s face suggests that either her doctor has prescribed some very relaxing herbal teas, or she is exceptionally enamored of campaigning. Her, let’s say, permanently fulfilled expression prompted so much speculation about her sex life that she has issued legal threats to rumor-mongering Web sites.
All in all, until very recently, the 2007 campaign had been glamorous and Clintonesque, fought out via the celebrity magazines — a thoroughly modern, media-led affair.
But deep down, the French distrust modernism. They long for the days when theirs was the international language of diplomacy and only France made sparkling wine.
Which might explain why a third candidate suddenly became such a serious contender.
Until eight weeks ago, François Bayrou, a centrist former minister of education, was a marginal figure, down there in the polls with the Marxists and the “save the organic truffle” brigade. Since then, he has leapt to join the leaders. He has stalled in third place, but one poll this week predicted that if Mr. Bayrou and Mr. Sarkozy face off in the clinching second round of the election, in May, Mr. Bayrou would win.
The question is, pourquoi?
Well, Mr. Bayrou is the anti-excitement candidate, a sort of political Prozac after all the amphetamines of the Sarkozy-Royal conflict. He is fairly young at 55, and he has a relatively full head of hair, but so far he has left the paparazzi in a soporific daze. He wants to unite everyone — he’s a member of a centrist party but might well appoint a Socialist prime minister; he is a Catholic but a staunch defender of secularism in schools. The message is that if he can unite God and the atheists, surely he can unite France.
Most of all, he is something that even urban voters see as quintessentially French — a farmer. His official Web site shows him pitchforking hay on the family farm, and he was recently quoted in the weekly Le Point as saying: “My friends and I aren’t the jet set. We’re the tractor set.”
One should not underestimate the strength of this rustic image in the national psyche. If you gave an average Frenchman the choice between a reforming president who would plug the country’s huge deficit and a good cheese, he would probably opt for the cheese.
This is why in France, candidates not only kiss babies, they kiss cows. Politicians flocked into the recent Agriculture Fair in Paris to be photographed embracing livestock. And no one looked more convincing in the clinch with a four-legged, hairy friend than Mr. Bayrou.
His rise in the polls seems to prove that, despite what they say, the French are upset by upheaval, revolted by revolt. They want things to stay the way they have always been. Even Louis XVI was able to provoke his subjects into guillotining him only because he tried to flee the country, thus making himself look a traitor. If he had stayed in Paris and hugged a few prize bulls, France would probably still be a monarchy.
Stephen Clarke is the author of “Talk to the Snail: The Ten Commandments for Understanding the French.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/opinion/23clarke.html?em&ex=1174881600&en=81ff6389e9bc98d2&ei=5087%0A
By STEPHEN CLARKE
Published: March 23, 2007
Paris
THE French claim to be a nation of rebels. They guillotined Louis XVI in 1793, they had uprisings in 1848 and 1871, and they boast that they maintain this noble tradition of protest in their habit of rioting every time there are rumblings of political discontent.
In fact, though, their heyday of revolution is over. Twenty-first century France rebels against change, not for it. These days, what typically happens is that a government decides to do something radical like, say, enable companies to fire service-sector workers who assault their customers. The unions see this as the first step on the slippery slope to slavery and call a national strike. After a week of posturing, the government backs down and waiters and sales clerks go back to insulting customers just as they have done since time immemorial.
The 2007 presidential election campaign is demonstrating just how deep this crypto-conservatism runs. After a relatively exciting, gossip-fired start to the battle for power, the French have decided, as the first round of the election approaches in April, that they want things to be boring again.
Historically, French presidents have been old, bald guys — Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac. In terms of sexiness, imagine an endless line of Dick Cheneys. This time, though, both front-runners have all their hair and, in one case, lipstick. Quite a novelty.
In the right-hand corner, you have a free-marketeer and friend to pop stars, Nicolas Sarkozy, 52. On the left, there is Ségolène Royal, age 53 but looking younger every day. She is unmarried but has four children with her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist Party chairman.
Given Ms. Royal and Mr. Sarkozy’s relative youth, it’s not surprising that this is the first time that sex has played such a large part in an electoral campaign. Everyone knew that Messrs. Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac had mistresses, but no one paid much attention because everything was done discreetly. Besides, the French don’t believe that monogamy makes a politician any more efficient.
This time around, sex has come storming out of the closet. There was the incident a couple of years ago when Mr. Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, ran off to New York with her lover. In a dramatic turnaround, Mr. Sarkozy wooed his wife back, maybe with promises that she’d soon be choosing the curtains in the presidential palace. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa smile on Ms. Royal’s face suggests that either her doctor has prescribed some very relaxing herbal teas, or she is exceptionally enamored of campaigning. Her, let’s say, permanently fulfilled expression prompted so much speculation about her sex life that she has issued legal threats to rumor-mongering Web sites.
All in all, until very recently, the 2007 campaign had been glamorous and Clintonesque, fought out via the celebrity magazines — a thoroughly modern, media-led affair.
But deep down, the French distrust modernism. They long for the days when theirs was the international language of diplomacy and only France made sparkling wine.
Which might explain why a third candidate suddenly became such a serious contender.
Until eight weeks ago, François Bayrou, a centrist former minister of education, was a marginal figure, down there in the polls with the Marxists and the “save the organic truffle” brigade. Since then, he has leapt to join the leaders. He has stalled in third place, but one poll this week predicted that if Mr. Bayrou and Mr. Sarkozy face off in the clinching second round of the election, in May, Mr. Bayrou would win.
The question is, pourquoi?
Well, Mr. Bayrou is the anti-excitement candidate, a sort of political Prozac after all the amphetamines of the Sarkozy-Royal conflict. He is fairly young at 55, and he has a relatively full head of hair, but so far he has left the paparazzi in a soporific daze. He wants to unite everyone — he’s a member of a centrist party but might well appoint a Socialist prime minister; he is a Catholic but a staunch defender of secularism in schools. The message is that if he can unite God and the atheists, surely he can unite France.
Most of all, he is something that even urban voters see as quintessentially French — a farmer. His official Web site shows him pitchforking hay on the family farm, and he was recently quoted in the weekly Le Point as saying: “My friends and I aren’t the jet set. We’re the tractor set.”
One should not underestimate the strength of this rustic image in the national psyche. If you gave an average Frenchman the choice between a reforming president who would plug the country’s huge deficit and a good cheese, he would probably opt for the cheese.
This is why in France, candidates not only kiss babies, they kiss cows. Politicians flocked into the recent Agriculture Fair in Paris to be photographed embracing livestock. And no one looked more convincing in the clinch with a four-legged, hairy friend than Mr. Bayrou.
His rise in the polls seems to prove that, despite what they say, the French are upset by upheaval, revolted by revolt. They want things to stay the way they have always been. Even Louis XVI was able to provoke his subjects into guillotining him only because he tried to flee the country, thus making himself look a traitor. If he had stayed in Paris and hugged a few prize bulls, France would probably still be a monarchy.
Stephen Clarke is the author of “Talk to the Snail: The Ten Commandments for Understanding the French.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/opinion/23clarke.html?em&ex=1174881600&en=81ff6389e9bc98d2&ei=5087%0A
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